Chinese sec-tech-company Nuctech wins the bid to modernize the largest airport in Sweden. A tidbit story that snuck in under the European radar among warnings of western storms and eastern wars. And to be fair, on the surface it is nothing revolutionary about it. Apparently, Nuctech operates in just about every single EU country, running security for sea- and airports both.
If one is inclined to make a stink out of this project acquisition, one should be mindful of the inherent sinophobia. In an article in AP, questions arise about the fiscal independence and motivations of Nuctech’s European front. Their capacity to out-perform and price-drop their competitors into obsolescence not least of which. But despite Nuctech EU CEO’s reassurances, the tangled web between Chinese corporate and government interests keeps turning out to be less of a tangle and more of a CCP stranglehold. If the Party says “jump”, investors, innovators and corporate moguls can’t leap into the air fast enough to avoid disappearing into a black bag.
And let us not forget how tech companies world wide love to exploit the data their technologies accumulate. Facebook got caught holding the bag for political manipulation in two of the western world’s most embarrassing shows of democratic failure in modern times. The collection, repackaging, and distribution of Big Data is perhaps the biggest ghost market in the world. Despite the fact that it spawned as a conspiracy theory, it is so very, very, very easy to believe that all those cute face filters you love to toy with inform and develop digitalized police states. And as we learn from the onslaught of free social media apps with their face filters and algorithms, if a product is presented to you as free or ridiculously cheap then you are the product.
But even if suspicion born out of mounting evidence is prudent, suspicion run amok breeds prejudice.
Back to the matter at hand, Sweden has a long (and sordid) history of streamlining project acquisitions and sales, founded around a set of laws intended to make sure that the “best offer” wins and keep prejudice and nepotism away from company dealings. Essentially, mechanics to limit corruption. Which, y’know, is good in theory…
Good until it became a matter of “best offer” equating to the “cheapest offer”, a misconception bred from incompetence and its own form of corruption. And when the cheapest offer is somewhere between 30 and 50 percent lower than your next competitor, a fair dose of scepticism seems warranted to anyone that isn’t a Scroogey fucking twat and solely concerned with rubbing monies together. Because when a deal is too good to be true, it ever so often isn’t. Time and time again we witness construction companies, technical consultation firms, infrastructure management conglomerates, fail in their victories to supply or perform in accordance with their bids.
And somewhere down here beneath all the what-ifs and anecdotes and disjointed facts, we’re supposed to find a bottom line. A line upon which we are supposed to believe that a foreign company hogtied by an authoritarian political juggernaut can supply public security services, of both inconceivably higher quality and lower cost than competitors, that will not aid and abet a police state elsewhere but also safeguard public liberties locally, and not ever pose a military security threat in an increasingly destabilizing world in which the aforementioned authoritarian political juggernaut seems eager to step in and seize influence and power. ‘Cause that’s a big line. Gnarly hook. Hefty sinker.
/Sebastian Lindberg 22/2-2022
WastedWords 